This project will create an unusual dataset consisting of the children of individuals who themselves benefited from a randomized health program during adolescence. This project will exploit experimental variation to credibly estimate the causal impact of this health program on the health and cognitive development of recipients' children, up to 17 years after the launch of the initial program. The project will survey a randomly selected subset of approximately 1,500 children aged 0-5 of 7,500 adult respondents in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), creating the new KLPS-Kids dataset. The original KLPS sample contains Kenyans who participated in an earlier health study, known as the Primary School Deworming Program (PSDP). The PSDP provided deworming medication to primary school students in rural western Kenya starting in 1998, where the order of phase-in to primary schools was randomized. Previous research finds that this intervention had substantial positive impacts on the health, schooling and labor market hours and earnings of beneficiaries 10 years after the launch of the program. These impacts on parents are a necessary pre-condition for studying later impacts among recipients' children, and to estimate the extent to which a health intervention can help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty by improving life outcomes for program beneficiaries' children. In order to measure the impacts on the recipients' children, this project will create locally appropriate versions of both standard and innovative survey instruments designed to measure various domains of development among children aged 0-5. Since the selection of beneficiaries for the PSDP was randomized, the data will enable the estimation of causal impacts of this program on recipients' children's outcomes, overcoming the key methodological problem of confounding. Despite strong a priori reasons to anticipate significant intergenerational transmission of parent health gains to their children, these effects have rarely been demonstrated to be causal, due to the near absence of experimental variation in parent health in combination with detailed data tracking both beneficiaries and their children. This information is essential for policymakers attempting to assess the cost-effectiveness of health and education programs, as a large part of program benefits may be a result of the long-run spillover gains experienced by program participants' children.
This project will create a dataset consisting of the children of individuals who themselves previously benefited from a randomized health (deworming) program. The project will exploit experimental variation to estimate the causal impact of this earlier program on the health and cognitive development of the recipients' children, overcoming the key methodological problem of confounding. The project will survey approximately 1,500 children of the 7,500 respondents in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), creating the new KLPS-Kids dataset, to estimate the extent to which a health program can help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
